1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for detecting an increase in thermal resistance of a heat sink in a computer system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Electrical components of computer systems today typically generate a large amount of heat during operation. If a component is overheated, errors in the computer system may occur including complete failure of the computer itself. To reduce the possibility of overheating components of today's computer systems, heat generated by such components is typically dissipated by a heat sink. Thermal resistance of a heat sink may increase over time which causes efficiency in dissipating component heat to decrease. Such an increase in thermal resistance may be cause by many factors such as, for example, dust build-up on the heat sink. Currently determining whether there is excessive dust build-up on a heat sink in a computer system typically requires powering-down a computer system and manually inspecting the heat sink for dust.